Circular cutting saws are well-known and widely employed in the construction, woodworking and like industries. Such saws are of various types, ranging from larger stationary apparatus, e.g., apparatus of the type sometimes referred to as table saws, to portable hand held saws. All such saws have in common the use of a circular saw blade rotatably supported in association with a drive motor to be driven about a central axis. Circular saw blades commonly have a substantially flat planar main body with an essentially circular circumferential periphery about which multiple cutting teeth are spaced such that, upon driven rotation of the saw blade, the teeth perform a cutting operation on wood or other material to which the blade is applied.
The main body of circular saw blades is typically made of a hardened metal alloy, most commonly a steel alloy. The cutting teeth of circular saw blades may be formed integrally as a part of the periphery of the main blade body or may be in the form of tips of a different harder material affixed rigidly to the periphery of the main body, for example, by a brazing process. The cutting tips in tipped saw blades are most commonly made of a carbide material because of its greater hardness and improved ability to maintain a sharpened edge over longer periods of use. The use of cutting tips also enables a greater variety of cutting edge shapes and geometries to be utilized than is typically possible with cutting teeth formed integrally with the main body of the saw blade.
While the provision of cutting tips offers these described advantages, the use of cutting tips also poses the challenge of ensuring that the tips are affixed to the blade body securely enough to resist being loosened or removed altogether under the effect of various forces acting on the tips in differing directions during cutting operations. Various proposals have been made in the industry to address this issue. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,794,503 proposes a specialized tip configuration intended to increase the strength of the bonding of the tip to the main blade body via brazing. This development still suffers certain drawbacks. First, the tip configuration is incompatible with typical conventional brazing equipment, thereby requiring specialized brazing machinery to accomplish the intended bonding of the tip to the blade body. Second, the tip configuration, when affixed to the blade body, is effective primarily only in resisting forces generally tangential to the blade periphery, but not forces in a generally radial direction.
Hence, there continues to exist a need in the industry for an improved saw blade with a tip configuration which can be secured using existing conventional brazing equipment and which also is effective to counteract forces acting on the saw blade in differing directions, in particular, both radial and tangential.